Cate Grace
Whānau Whanake
Cate Grace has a strong conviction about health, to which she has applied an even stronger entrepreneurial vision towards a change in how we nationally address concerns of wellbeing —both as individuals, and as a country-wide network of coexisting communities. Whānau Whanake, a community-based social enterprise she runs with her husband in Christchurch, is a Whānau Ora initiative imbued with Cate’s passion for health and wellbeing, the knowledge of her indigenous tīpuna, and her own lived experience of the healthcare system. Unaware of the problems her latent immunological condition was about to bring her, Cate lived in the assumption common to those without overt access needs—that her body would always perform the way it ‘should’, and the world would always accommodate her. As it turned out, both her body and the available support systems upended this expectation. In hindsight the main problems were to do with a blinkered status quo concerning the needs of the public, and a lack of resources to support diversity. Cate now finds herself in a position to address these limiting conceptions of public health towards a future system that’s puts the needs of the individual at the heart of the process.
SHIFT TO POSSIBILITY
After her diagnosis Cate refused to relinquish her relationship with exercise, seeing the tending of the body as an important pillar of hauora (Māori system of wellbeing focused on the integration and supporting of the whole person in a strengths-based and holistic manner). In an effort to support her tinana, physical health Cate sought a trainer to learn how to exercise with her chronic health, and inadvertently discovered a whole community of similarly effected people whose hauora journeys had been disrupted by varying access needs, both sudden and congenital. This, combined with a growing awareness of problems specific to the area after the 2011 earthquakes, compelled Cate and her husband to provide a service of ‘community delivery’, in which not one but many needs were being met. Cate began as a personal trainer catering to those whose bodies required alternate routes to fitness, accommodating the differently-abled where standard gyms either couldn’t or simply refused from the perceived risks. Beyond this, the quakes left certain parts of Christchurch with very little infrastructure, practically stranding many areas amidst the rebuild. Moving swiftly beyond a one dimensional personal training service and incentivised by abysmal findings around equitable outcomes for Māori and disability services in the Simpson Report (2020), Whānau Whanake has now set up in the style of an urban marae with their own physical location; a community space not unlike a modern-day pā in which the immediate needs of an individual or community can be heard and any barriers can be worked through. As a potential resource for the coming upheavals in our national health system, Whānau Whanake is at the front line as a model for how the benefits of connection, collaboration and partnership can support communities.
CATE AND THE GCOP
Cate took part in the Be Leadership programme in 2013, but it wasn’t until a few years later that the GCOP got wind of Whānau Whanake and contacted her personally, with the opportunity of a place to refine and build on her vision. Cate has continued to explore the importance of conversation, relevant to both Whānau Whanake and the GCOP, as a foundational tool in shifting the narrative from working for those with access needs to working with. Arguably the problems those with access needs face currently stem from a system, in which their specific needs are observed externally and treated as problems which require ‘smoothing out’. Nothing truly productive or empowering can come from this dynamic, which sustains a framing of the differently-abled as problems to be aped, and not as citizens in their own right with their own voices and unique contributions to make.